Divine Injustice

The bible is considered to be the one definitive, primary source of the history of the Hebrew God and His dealings with His creation, mankind. It is considered by most religions to be a historical text, and to be accepted as fact (and that's the gospel truth); all conflicting accounts of the same events and non-literal methods of interpretation aside, the bible is understood to contain nothing but the facts: Quod non est biblicum, non est theological. With that established it is impossible to finagle, interpret, justify, or otherwise weasel away the fact that God is a tyrant. He is, in fact, the supreme tyrant, with a host of unimaginable powers and a virtually infinite base of followers at His disposal, a fact which He made abundantly clear to a man named Job.

Job lived sometime around 5th century BCE. He was "Blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil." He is characterized in the book of Job as a man who was wholly pious and loyal to his god, as well as his fellow man, sparing no pains to aid those in need. However, Satan dared God to remove first Job's prosperity and then his health to see if the man was only faithful because of these gifts; God took the dare, and a veritable holocaust ensued. Job, his family, his flocks, and his servants were all crushed beneath His omnipotent heel.

Left diseased and forsaken in the rubble of his former life, Job has the audacity to question his maker, who had blessed him with such prosperity, and to lament his tragic position. Of course, Job's high-minded and forthright peers (who, by the way, still had homes and families) chastised him for his sacrilegious behavior. Who was Job to question the almighty God, even should He choose to end lives by the thousands to prove a moot point? Job's grief over all that he had lost was viewed as unjust and unwarranted.

Finally, at the apex of his anguish, Job called upon God Himself to provide a reason for this sudden onset of misery and misfortune. After Job's peers had had their say, God deigned to speak to him. The almighty justified His actions to Job much as He did to Satan: by expressing the hugeness of His own glorious manhood. "Were you there when I laid the foundation of the earth?" asked the Lord. "Who determined its measurements?" "Who shut in the sea with doors?" "Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?" "Is the wild ox willing to serve you?" "Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like His?" Under this barrage of Godly machismo and arm-flexing, Job has no choice but to submit, and repent "in dust and ashes."

All of this is certainly effective and a powerful statement when taken from a didactic standpoint. God is omnipotent, man is not; god giveth and God can taketh away. But what is the point? It is said that humans are made after God's own image. Do parents, after birthing and raising their child and providing him with all the necessary lessons and resources for success, suddenly revoke these gifts? Do they let their child fall into misery and futureless poverty simply to prove that, because they created the child, they have absolute power over him? Obviously, any parent with even the barest sense of compassion for his child would never imagine doing such a thing, even at the furthest reaches of punishment for a wrong. If the child is blameless, it would be negligence and sheer lunacy; the law would intervene to ensure the protection of the innocent. Here's a modern-day scenario to parallel that found in the book of Job:

Parent: "My Timmy sure is a great son, isn't he?"
Neighbor: "Yeah, I guess so. But I bet he wouldn't be so hot without his home, or his clothes, or his health."
Parent: "Good point. I'd better throw him out into the street naked and diseased to find out."

Too bad there's no Social Services to check up on God.

Job was right, in his anguish, to wish that he had never been created. What is the purpose of coming to be, if all is to end in misery, if all that one has worked to build is to be destroyed in such an offhand manner? But then, that is the point of the story of Job: if God chooses to take away that which He provided, it is His divine right, one not to be questioned by His own creations. After all, He made the crocodiles and the sun, snow, and rain. He makes the sun rise, and goats give birth, so men in their lowliness have no right to question their Father. Such a world wise and holier-than-though dogma is sickening; How many millions have died in His name, and how many more will be killed under the guise of doing the work of God? When will the crusades end if they are still being launched in the 21st century? If all the books of God really are true in the literal sense, and the Creator truly is a narcissistic tyrant and worshipper of His own awful power, then this particular child of God wants none of it. It was Isaac Asimov who put it best, when he mused that "it's no wonder a third of the angels rebelled."